The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world

Abstract

In evangelical churches across the United States, volunteers assist other church members in transforming household budgets into lenses that reveal God's kingdom on earth, reframing the force and volatility of markets as divine mystery. The strategies of financial ministry are distinctive, yet they engage a more general conundrum that pits economic success against conflicting ethical projects; they illuminate the process of ethical management in the financial economy. The ministries’ uses of budgets also challenge the idea that market devices gain power primarily by formatting economic transactions and establishing conditions for market exchange. Evangelical financial ministries show how, in everyday calculative practices, a device such as a household budget renders the spiritual economic, and the economic spiritual. In the exercise of evangelical ethics, financial ministry returns the divine touch to the invisible hand. [Christianity, economy, ethics, finance, households, markets, United States]

Keywords and key words in AE

“…Further, intersecting these themes is the analytical lens of ethics , which appears 10 times in 2016, or 15 times if combined with morality ; occasionally both words are used as keywords in the same article to emphasize its centrality to the analysis (e.g., in Sylvia Tidey's [] article on the ambiguous ethics of anticorruption policy in Indonesia, which also has ethical in the title). But ethics is also frequently used in relation to themes of religion (e.g., Abu‐Lughod ; Bush ; Zaloom ), as well as other themes not typically associated with it, such as the infrastructure of Californian home aesthetics in the Anthropocene (Vine ).…”

New subjectivities: Aspiration, prosperity and the new middle class

“…Neo-charismatic churches have often appeared to be overly concerned with money. Accounts of their 'prosperity gospel' have drawn attention to the quasi-gift economy these churches instantiate by insisting that their congregants pay generouslythat is, titheinto church coffers (Zaloom 2016;Bähre 2011;Van Wyk 2014), in what has been called a 'miracle seeding' approach. Qualifying the quasi-magical focus of such accounts, others indicate that the money is used for this-worldly purposes.…”

“…Qualifying the quasi-magical focus of such accounts, others indicate that the money is used for this-worldly purposes. Tithing can be seen as underpinning the creation of an autonomous community with its own welfare system, and as inculcating notions of self-control, planning one's money, and saving (Bernstein & Rule 2011;Freeman 2012;Comaroff 2012;Zaloom 2016). Erik Bähre (2011) shows that these churches share something with social grants and insurances: much like the state, but also in its place, they collect and then facilitate the redistribution of income.…”

Subjects of Debt: Financial Subjectification and Collaborative Risk in Malaysian Islamic Finance

“…This essay documents what I term financial subjectification, which I define as the deployment of financial devices to inculcate and elicit subjective dispositions, modes of fiscal being, and courses of economic action. In taking this approach, I build on contemporary work in the anthropology of finance that has shown how financial practices and technologies shape both subjects and selves (Holmes ; Miyazaki ; Zaloom ). The sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato insightfully demonstrates how debt is a technology of subjectification by noting that recent debt devices are “part of a long process in which we have witnessed techniques for making a debtor ‘subject’” (2012, 131).…”